---
title: "Microsoft DeepSpeed achieves the fastest BERT training time"
excerpt: ""
tags: training
date: 2020-05-28 00:00:00
---

Good news! **DeepSpeed obtains the fastest BERT training record: 44 minutes on
1024 NVIDIA V100 GPU.**  This is a 30% improvement over the best published result
of 67 mins in end-to-end training time to achieve the same accuracy on the same
number and generation of GPUs. This improvement does not come at the cost of
excessive hardware resources but comes from improved software efficiency.  For
example, DeepSpeed can attain a staggering 64 teraflops of single GPU
performance on a NVIDIA V100 GPU which is over 50% of the hardware peak.

In this blog post, we will discuss four technological improvements that enable
DeepSpeed to achieve this record-breaking BERT training time.

1.  Highly optimized transformer kernels to improve compute efficiency
2.  Overlapping I/O with computation through asynchronous prefetching queue
3.  Sparse output processing to eliminate wasteful computation
4.  Layer-norm reordering for training stability and faster convergence

These optimizations not only benefit BERT; they are also applicable to many
other transformer-based models such as RoBERTa, XLNet, and UniLM. Furthermore, besides the improvements mentioned for pre-training, DeepSpeed achieves up to 1.5x speedups for the downstream tasks, such as the fine-tuning for Bing-BERT SQuAD.

## Performance Results for BERT Pretraining

Compared to SOTA, DeepSpeed significantly improves single GPU performance for
transformer-based model like BERT. Figure 1 shows the single GPU throughput of
training BERT-Large optimized through DeepSpeed, comparing with the two
well-known PyTorch implementations from [NVIDIA
BERT](https://github.com/NVIDIA/DeepLearningExamples/tree/master/PyTorch/LanguageModeling/BERT)
and [Hugging Face
BERT](https://github.com/huggingface/transformers/blob/master/src/transformers/modeling_bert.py).
DeepSpeed reaches as high as 64 and 53 teraflops throughputs (corresponding to
272 and 52 samples/second) for sequence lengths 128 and 512, respectively,
exhibiting up to 28% throughput improvements over NVIDIA BERT and up to 62%
over HuggingFace BERT.  We also support up to 1.8x larger batch size without
running out of memory.

To achieve this performance, DeepSpeed implements a stochastic transformer
which exhibits some level of non-deterministic noise without affecting overall
convergence. In addition, DeepSpeed also implements a deterministic transformer
kernel that is completely reproducible at the expense of a small performance
regression of approximately 2% on average.  Users can easily choose and switch
between the two versions depending on their usage scenarios: Stochastic version
pursues ultimate training performance goal, and deterministic version may save
development time by better facilitating experimentation and debugging.  We
report performance numbers for both these kernels in Figure 1. The performance
numbers were collected with a gradient accumulation step of 10 for all batch
sizes and configurations, since on average an overall batch size used in
practical scenarios range from a few hundred to a few thousand.


![Transformer-Kernel-Throughput-128](/assets/images/transformer_kernel_perf_seq128.PNG){: .align-center}

![Transformer-Kernel-Throughput-512](/assets/images/transformer_kernel_perf_seq512.PNG){: .align-center}

Figure 1: Performance evaluation of BERT-Large on a single V100 GPU, comparing
DeepSpeed with NVIDIA and HuggingFace versions of BERT in mixed-sequence length
training. The labeled points show the highest throughput of each implementation
in teraflops (Tflops). DeepSpeed boosts throughput and allows for higher batch
sizes without running out-of-memory.

Looking at distributed training across GPUs, Table 1 shows our end-to-end
BERT-Large pre-training time (F1 score of 90.5 for SQUAD) using 16 to 1024 GPUs.
We complete BERT pre-training in 44 minutes using 1024 V100 GPUs (64 NVIDIA
DGX-2 nodes). In comparison, the previous SOTA from NVIDIA takes 47 mins using
1472 V100 GPUs. DeepSpeed is not only faster but also uses  30% less resources.
Using the same 1024 GPUS,NVIDIA BERT takes 67 minutes using the same 1024 GPUs
[1] BERT, whereas DeepSpeed takes 44 minutes, reducing training time by 30%.
Similarly, on 256 GPUs, NVIDIA BERT takes 236 minutes while DeepSpeed takes 144
minutes (39% faster).

| Number of nodes | Number of V100 GPUs | Time         |
| --------------- | ------------------- | ------------ |
| 1 DGX-2         | 16                  | 33 hr 13 min |
| 4 DGX-2         | 64                  | 8 hr 41 min  |
| 16 DGX-2        | 256                 | 144 min      |
| 64 DGX-2        | 1024                | 44 min       |

Table 1: BERT-Large training time using 1 to 64 DGX-2's with DeepSpeed.

At the recent GTC 2020, NVIDIA announced the next generation hardware A100,
which now offers 2.5X hardware peak performance over the V100 GPU.  Assuming
the A100 GPU allows us to obtain the same percentage of hardware peak
performance (50%) as we obtained on V100 GPUs, we expect to obtain even higher
throughput by combining our software optimizations with the new hardware. We
project it would reduce BERT training time further to less than 25 minutes on a
cluster of 1024 A100 GPUs.

## Performance Results for Fine-Tuning Tasks

In addition to the performance benefits we show for the pre-training,
we have evaluated the performance of our customized kernel for fine-tuning the
downstream tasks. Tables 2 and 3 show the samples-per-second achieved when running
Bing-BERT SQuAD on NVIDIA V100 using 16 and 32 GB of memory, using PyTorch and DeepSpeed transformer kernels.
For the 16-GB V100, we can achieve up to 1.5x speedup while supporting 2x larger batch size per GPU.
On the other hand, we can support as large as 32 batch size (2.6x more than Pytorch) using 32GB of memory, while providing 1.3x speedup for the end-to-end fine-tune training. Note, that we use the best
samples-per-second to compute speedup for the cases that PyTorch runs out-of-memory (OOM).

| Micro batch size | PyTorch | DeepSpeed | Speedup (x) |
| ---------------- | ------- | --------- | ----------- |
| 4                | 36.34   | 50.76     | 1.4         |
| 6                | OOM     | 54.28     | 1.5         |
| 8                | OOM     | 54.16     | 1.5         |

Table 2. Samples/second for running SQuAD fine-tuning on NVIDIA V100 (16-GB) using PyTorch and DeepSpeed transformer kernels.

| Micro batch size | PyTorch | DeepSpeed | Speedup (x) |
| ---------------- | ------- | --------- | ----------- |
| 4                | 37.78    | 50.82      | 1.3        |
| 6                | 43.81    | 55.97      | 1.3         |
| 12               | 49.32    | 61.41      | 1.2         |
| 24               | OOM      | 60.70      | 1.2         |
| 32               | OOM      | 63.01      | 1.3         |

Table 3: Samples/second for running SQuAD fine-tuning on NVIDIA V100 (32-GB) using PyTorch and DeepSpeed transformer kernels.


## BERT Highly Optimized Transformer Kernels

GPUs have very high peak floating-point throughput, but the default Transformer
blocks in most framework implementations are far from reaching this peak.
Figure 2 shows the structure of a Transformer block with the LayerNorm placed
on the input stream of the two sublayers: Attention and Feed-Forward.   To
approach the GPU peak performance,  we employ two lines of optimizations in our
own Transformer kernel implementation: advanced fusion, and invertible
operators.

![Transformer-PreLN-Arch](/assets/images/transformer_preln_arch.png){: .align-center}

Figure 2: Transformer Layer with Pre-LayerNorm Architecture

### (a) Advanced fused kernels to reduce data movement

We observe that transformer-based networks trigger many invocations of CUDA
kernels operating in a producer-consumer fashion, adding a lot of cost for
transferring data to and from global memory and overhead from kernel launching.
Existing compiler-based approaches perform fine-grained fusion (e.g., fusion of
element-wise operations), leading to missed fusion opportunities. In contrast,
we fully exploit both fine-grain and coarse-grained fusion, tailored for
Transformer blocks.

**QKV and various fusions.**  We merge the three Query (Q), Key (K), and Value (V)
weight matrices to dispatch a larger QKV GEMM to expose more parallelism and
improve data locality on GPU’s shared memory and register files, as shown in
Figure 3. Next, we combine the data-layout transformation of the QKV’s output
matrix with the bias addition. We then partition the large QKV matrix into
three transformed ones, used for the following self-attention computation.

As Figure 3 illustrates, we read the QKV matrix in consecutive rows (shown by
red box), and write them in the three transformed Q, K, and V matrices. Since
each matrix starts from a different offset, we may have uncoalesced access to
the main memory. Thus, we use the shared memory as an intermediate buffer, in
order to rearrange the data in a way that we can put the data in consecutive
parts of memory. Even though we produce an uncoalesced pattern when accessing
shared memory, we reduce the cost of uncoalesced access to main memory to
better exploit memory bandwidth, resulting in 3% to 5% performance improvement
in the end-to-end training.

![QKV-Fusion](/assets/images/qkv_fusion.png){: .align-center}

Figure 3: QKV’s GEMM and transform Kernel-Fusion

We perform additional fusions such as merging the addition of bias from the
attention-output GEMM with the addition from the residual connection and also
dropout, which allows accesses to happen in the register files and shared
memory, which are orders of magnitude faster than the expensive write-back to
the global memory.

**Warp-level communication.** To alleviate the synchronization overhead among
parallel GPU cores and further increase the resource utilization of the fused
kernels, we use the warp-level (data shuffle instructions) instead of the
default inter-warp communication. Take the layer-normalization and SoftMax
kernel as examples, we perform each reduction operation inside a warp, while
distributing different reductions across different warps. This way, we
alleviate the synchronization among the parallel threads and further increase
the GPU resource utilization.

**Stochastic vs deterministic kernels.** DL training is generally robust to some
level of stochasticity, and in some cases, controlled noises such as dropouts
act as regularizer which improve generalization. In designing our transformer
kernel, we embrace some level of stochasticity to improve throughput by
allowing for limited data race conditions to exist in the kernel: We leverage
implicit warp synchronous programming to achieve higher performance for the
warp-level cooperative operations [3]. The lack of explicit warp level
synchronization act as non-deterministic noise without affecting the overall
convergence behavior of the transformer kernels while giving a decent
throughput boost.

In addition, DeepSpeed also implements a non-stochastic transformer kernel with
explicit warp synchronization that produces deterministic results  at the
expense of a small performance regression.  Users can easily choose and switch
between the two versions depending on their usage scenarios: Stochastic version
pursues ultimate training performance goal, and deterministic version may save
development time by better facilitating experimentation and debugging.

In our experiments, we use stochastic kernels for the pre-training BERT, while
using non-stochastic kernels for fine-tuning to achieve fully reproducible
results. We recommend using stochastic kernels for training tasks involving
massive amounts of data such as pre-training, while using non-stochastic
version when training with limited data such as in the case of fine-tuning for
more consistent results.

**Cost-effective rematerialization.** When fusing kernels of the different
operations, we observe that some operators are inexpressive to compute but
incur expensive data movement cost, such as addition of bias and dropout. For
these operations, we avoid saving their results in the forward pass, but
instead recompute them during the backward pass, which turns out to be much
faster than having their results written and reloaded from the main memory.

### (b) Invertible operators to save memory and run large batches

We also observe that the intermediate activations from several operators in the
Transformer blocks incur a large memory consumption, such as SoftMax and Layer
Norm.  For these operators, we drop the inputs to these layers to reduce the
footprint of activation memory, by leveraging the fact that they are invertible
functions, which are functions whose backward pass is independent of the inputs
and can be formulated based only on the outputs [2]. Figure 4 and Figure 5 show
the examples of the original implementation of SoftMax and Layer-Norm in
PyTorch versus the invertible SoftMax implementation in DeepSpeed. Through this
optimization, we are able to reduce the activation memory of the operator by
half, and the reduced memory allows us to train with larger batch sizes, which
once again improves GPU efficiency.

![Softmax-torch](/assets/images/softmax_pytorch.gif){: .align-center}

![Softmax-DS](/assets/images/softmax_deepspeed.gif){: .align-center}

Figure 4: DeepSpeed invertible SoftMax operation versus Default PyTorch SoftMax operation

![LayerNorm-DS](/assets/images/layernorm_pytorch.gif){: .align-center}

![LayerNorm-DS](/assets/images/layernorm_deepspeed.gif){: .align-center}

Figure 5: DeepSpeed invertible LayerNorm operation versus Default PyTorch LayerNorm operation

## Overlapping I/O with Computation through Asynchronous Prefetching Queue

Beyond highly optimized transformer kernels, the BERT training has other
performance limiting factors, e.g., data loading.  We develop our own
asynchronous worker which prefetches batches of data into a queue only at “safe
points” -- points when the CPUs are idle (e.g., right after asynchronously
launching the forward pass). In this way, we make sure that there is no
dequeuing and copying data from CPU to GPU when there is computation on the CPU
side. This is different from the default PyTorch data loader, which can
prefetch data at any points and cause performance interference. By using this
method, we hide almost all I/O overhead, which accounts for 4% of the original
training time.

## Exploiting Sparsity of BERT’s Output Processing

We improve the end-to-end training time by 5.4% by recognizing and exploiting
sparsity in BERT’s output processing. The output processing involves two steps:
i)  BERT projection from the hidden output dimension of the final transformer
layer to the language vocabulary, using a matrix-matrix multiplication, and ii)
a cross-entropy of the masked output tokens to the get each sequence’s
prediction error. The cost of the first step is proportional to the vocabulary
size, hidden output dimension and the sequence length, and can be as expensive
as a transformer layer computation or more. However, only about 15% of the
tokens are masked, and we only need the cross-entropy for the masked tokens.
Therefore, the projection can be done as an efficient sparse computation. To do
so, we discard the rows of the final transformer layer that corresponding to
the non-masked tokens before doing the projection, reducing the computation
cost of output processing by 85%.

## Pre-LayerNorm vs Post-LayerNorm Architecture

We observe that with large batch size (e.g., 64K) the default BERT pre-training
suffers from training instability, which can result in model divergence or
convergence to bad/suspicious local optima.  Further investigation shows that
the default BERT has vanishing gradients issue. To mitigate the issue, we
changed the placement of LayerNorm (Post-LayerNorm) by placing it only on the
input stream of the sublayers in the Transformer block (called Pre-LayerNorm),
a modification described by several recent works for neural machine
translation. The Pre-LayerNorm results in several useful characteristics such
as avoiding vanishing gradient, stable optimization, and performance gain.  It
allows us to train at aggregated batch size of 64K with increased learning rate
and faster convergence.


To try out these optimizations and training recipe, please check out our [BERT
training tutorial](https://www.deepspeed.ai/tutorials/bert-pretraining/) and
source code at the [DeepSpeed GitHub
repo](https://github.com/microsoft/deepspeed).

### References

[1] "NVIDIA Clocks World’s Fastest BERT Training Time and Largest Transformer Based Model, Paving Path For Advanced Conversational AI" [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/training-bert-with-gpus/](https://devblogs.nvidia.com/training-bert-with-gpus/).

[2] S. R. Bulo, L. Porzi, and P. Kontschieder, "In-place activated batch norm for memory-optimized training of dnns" 2017. [http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.02616](http://arxiv.org/abs/1712.02616).

[3] Mark Harris and Kyrylo Perelygin, "Cooperative Groups: Flexible CUDA Thread Programming", [https://devblogs.nvidia.com/cooperative-groups/]( https://devblogs.nvidia.com/cooperative-groups/).
